POLKINGHORNE, John

The Faith of a Physicist (Reflections of a bottom-up thinker: the Gifford lectures for 1993-4)

Princeton University Press, 1994

As the second subtitle indicates the contents of this book were delivered at the University of Edinburgh as the Gifford Lectures for the academic year 1993-94. Since these reflections center around various articles of the Nicene Creed, the author considered it appropriate to justify his approach as consonant with the terms of Lord Gifford's will which establish that these lectures are to treat Natural Theology as a strictly natural science.

The author is an Anglican priest since 1982. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a former Cambridge professor of Mathematical Physics. Currently he is President of Queens' College, Cambridge. His personal scientific experience is that of a theoretical elementary particle physicist. He characterizes himself as a bottom-up thinker, which he contrasts with a top-down thinker. The former take experienced data as the starting point whereas the latter take evident general principles as their starting point. While not denying a role to "such ambitious intellectual effort", i.e., the top-down thinking he considers to be the instinctive approach of many theologians, he is "wary of it" and wishes to "temper its grand generality with the questionings that arise from the consideration of particularity" (pp. 4-5).

The author considers that "the interaction between science and religious reflection is not limited to those topics (such as cosmic history) concerning which the two disciplines offer complementary insights" (p. 1). His own "religious reflections" have more of the character of an apologetic for Christian faith than as a demonstration, whether a priori or a posteriors, of the existence of God. "I have wished to revalue the classical 'proofs' of God's existence as suggestive insights rather than logically coercive demonstrations" (p. 41). "The character of natural theology is insightful rather than demonstrative" (p. 46). "My concern is to explore to what extent we can use the search for motivated understanding, so congenial to the scientific mind, as a route to being able to make the substance of Christian orthodoxy our own" (p. 1). Thus his reflections extend not only to topics which would traditionally be considered capable of demonstration but also to others that would be traditionally considered as incapable of demonstration. The title of these lectures seems a very appropriate characterization. They are a personal profession of faith supported by considerations intended to show that such a faith is reasonable and consonant with current scientific beliefs.

"The approach followed is the one, natural to a scientist, of the search for motivated belief, together with the recognition that the way things actually are often proves contrary to prior expectation and thus enlarges our intellectual imagination" (p. 2). "The fundamental question to be asked about any theology statement is, 'What is the evidence that makes you think this might be true?' Of course, the kind of evidence considered, and the kind of understanding attained, must be conformed to the Reality about which one is attempting to speak, but so it is in the natural sciences also" (pp. 3-4). His stress on evidence as opposed to mere conceptual analysis is constant, as is his rejection of any narrow restriction of evidence to that appropriate, for instance, in physics or chemistry. The full range of human experience must be accepted as evidence. "It was a brilliant tactic of investigation for Galileo and his successors to confine themselves to the primary quantitative questions of matter and motion, but that narrow view would be a poor metaphysical strategy, condemning one to a narrow reductionist conception of reality. Those discarded secundary qualities of human perception may in fact prove to be primary clues to the construction of an ampler view of the way the world is" (p. 9).

"For me, the Nicene Creed is not a demand for intellectual surrender to a set of nonnegotiable propositions; instead it represents the summary of insights and experience garnered from the founding centuries of the Church's history" (p. 6). Thus "the creed is very sparse in its formulation. It provides a framework for Christian thought. The way I fill in that outline is influenced, both in style and in content, by my experiences as a scientist (more particularly, a theoretical elementary particle physics) and as a twentieth-century Christian believer who has spent all his life within the contemporary worshipping and confessing community of faith" (p. 3). Clearly a reader should not expect to find an expression of Catholic faith in these reflections, and in fact there are a number of important discrepancies between the author's faith and the Catholic faith.

"Revelation is not the presentation of unchallengeable dogmas for reception by the unquestioning faithful. Rather, it is the record of those transparent events or persons in which the divine will and presence have been most clearly discernible" (pp. 5-6). The author's style, as exemplified in this statement, is frequently excessively dichotomous. The second alternative, which he accepts, does not exclude the presentation of prepositional content conveyed by God through words and events recorded in Holy Scripture. "Even though such events and persons are unique and non-repeatable, they must not be excluded on that account. The need to seek God where he can most clearly be seen has the consequence that the unique is not to be excluded from our consideration" (p. 5). "Opportunities for gaining insight are not wilfully to be refused" (p. 6). "What I want to know is whether the strange and exciting claims of orthodox Christianity are tenable in a scientific age" (p. 7). "I want to try to show that although faith goes beyond what is logically demonstrable —and what worthwhile view of reality does not?— yet it is capable of rational motivation" (p. 5).

The author often insists on the need to turn to experience in order to know how things actually are. "Natural theology derives from the general exercise of reason and the inspection of the world. It is part of theology's necessary engagement with the way things actually are" (p. 3). "Throughout, my aim will be to seek an understanding based on a careful assessment of phenomena as the guide to reality" (p. 8). The Bible constitutes a datum which must be considered. Yet "for me, the Bible is neither an inerrant account of prepositional truth nor a compendium of timeless symbols, but a historically conditioned account of certain significant encounters and experiences" (p. 8). Here as in other important assertions, the author formulates a false dichotomy, at least on the face of it, which could lean toward a "modernist" conception of revelation. This is symptomatic of his rejection of dogmatic authority of the Pope and of bishops together with the Pope in Council.

"I present such understandings of the nature of humanity and of how we may gain knowledge, as result from a critical encounter with the findings and methods of modern science" (p. 1). "Such concepts as we may form of the nature of humanity and its relationship to God, will exercise an influence upon how one approaches and understands the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of Christ" (p. 3).

We cannot be satisfied with a mere recitation of fact but must seek an appropriate explanation that accounts for how things actually are. "Even his" (Newton's) "achievements could amount to no more than verisimilitude" (p. 7). Yet we cannot be satisfied with less than verisimilitude either. "Our concern is with the search for truth" (p. 30). In human matters, where we have to rely on human experience, "we must maintain a dialogue with the past as a corrective to the limitations of the present" (p. 8). The insistence on true becoming is present from the start. "The physical world is a universe endowed with true becoming" (p. 1). However, this true becoming is not simply opposed to Parmenidean illusory becoming, but also to any mere cyclical becoming of new individuals. It entails an evolutionary becoming of new and more highly organized kinds of individuals. This entails a causal influence which would be called final causality in classical terminology and cannot be reduced to mere efficient causality. His insistence on the objective nature of truth goes so far that while embracing tolerance with respect to persons who hold non-Christian beliefs, he rejects tolerance of error itself. "In the end, it is the question of truth that matters, and there is an inevitable exclusivity about truth" (p. 190).

Concerning human nature

"None of us can do without metaphysics. We all need to form a world-view going beyond the particularities of our individual disciplines. Scientists are especially prone to recoil from the notion of what they fear will prove to be the cloudy claims of such a generality, and then go on to promote the insights of their own field of study into a rule for all" (p. 9).

"Ian Barbour has identified three metaphysical implications of current physics: (1) temporality and historicity (the physical world is endowed with true becoming); (2) chance and law (the intertwining of regularity and randomness as the basis of fruitfully evolving process); (3) wholeness and emergence (increasing complexity of organization gives rise to wholes which cannot adequately be described in terms of their parts alone)" (pp. 9-10). "For theology, the critical metaphysical issues are the nature of humanity and the coherence and plausibility of the concept of God, issues in whose consideration physics will play only a modest role" (p. 10).

"It was a brilliant intuition" of Anaximenes "to surmise that behind the variety of the physical world's appearance there might be just a limited kind of basic physical stuff" (p. 10).

"The existence of consciousness is a fact of fundamental significance about the world in which we live" (p. 11). "The essence of consciousness is awareness rather than mere ratiocination" (p. 11). "In self-consciousness we are getting close to the centre of the mystery of personhood" (p. I 1). He rejects the notion that man could be machine or a computer, and in general reductionist science. "It flies in the face of our direct experience of mind and treats as uninteresting what is in fact the most significant development of cosmic history: a universe become aware of itself" (p. 12).

"I take the existence of rationality and free will to be part of the foundation on which to build a bottom-up metaphysics. The strategy is to take with equal seriousness all parts of basic human experience" (p. 13). "I would want to go further, beyond the recognition of free agency and intellect, to discern a component of human life which calls for labelling as spiritual. By that I mean simply that there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfillment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves" (p. 13).

"It is suggested that we are not by nature self-sufficient beings, but in our heteronomy we need to find the way of being reunited with the Ground of our being. The fall is not to be understood as a single disastrous ancestral act from which all our troubles flow. Yet in the course of human evolution there must have been a period of dawning consciousness of the self, accompanied by dawning consciousness of God, in which the former was asserted against the claims of the latter" (p. 15). "It is even conceivable that this would bring about a genetic bias towards a certain kind of human nature" (p. 15).

"This character of spiritual openness possessed by humanity stands in some tension with our understanding that we have emerged in the course of a history of continuous development linking the universe today with the expanding and rapidly transmuting fireball consequent upon the big bang" (p. 16). "Yet one can accept the insights of natural selection and still feel that one has not heard the full story" (p. 16). "So much of evolutionary argument seems to be that'it's happened and so it must have happened this way... (p. 17). Timescale presents a serious problem which has not been addressed. "There is a direction of increasing complexity apparent in nature" (p. 17). Yet "neo-Darwinism" does not enable the prediction of long-term increase in complexity. The development of the human brain is the most severe problem. "I would want to suggest that the sensible and hopeful alternative direction" (to natural selection) " in which to look is to the existence of higher-order organizing principles, at work in the history of the world" (p. 18).

"Basically there are two alternative strategies" to account for man. "One treats the mental and the physical as entirely distinct kinds of reality. This is the approach of dualism, and its modern patron saint is Rene Descartes" (p. 19). After mentioning standard objections he says that "these difficulties with dualism are greatly enhanced by our modern evolutionary understanding of the origin of humanity from lower forms of animal life" (p. 19). "There seems to be an implied restraint on the nature of the physical before it can be a fitting receptacle for the mental, which hints at a connection between the two, unexplained by dualist theory" (p. 19). He calls the alternative a "dual-aspect monism. There is only one stuff in the world (not two — the material and the mental), but it can occur in two contrasting states (material and mental phases, a physicist would say) which explain our perception of the difference between mind and matter" (p. 21). "A dual-aspect monism will be some sort of complementary mind/matter metaphysic (there is only one stuff, just as there is only one light); and it seems possible, by analogy, that the clue to its consistency will lie in some radical indefiniteness present in the structure of the basic stuff" (pp. 24-25). He expects more help can be obtained from the theory of chaos than from quantum theory, since the former allows for structured randomness. "The ontological picture proposed is one of increasing complexity generating increasing openness within which there is increasing scope for the use of explanatory causative concepts of a holistic and increasingly mental-looking kind" (p. 26). Read final causality here. The solution to the mind body problem could well take many centuries yet. "In the meantime we have a rudimentary picture of a physical world evolving entities like ourselves whose open flexibility enables them to participate in an everlasting noetic world of thought ... Out of the primeval quark soup have emerged saints and mathematicians" (p. 27). The world has evolved from an initial chaotic "soup" by virtue of intrinsic principles rather then distinct divine interventions, although the whole of creation depends in its entirety on God who is the ground of its being and is provident with respect to it. There is no creation of individual souls conjoined to matter.

The author certainly rejects a materialistic reductionist account which would claim that physical and chemical laws (ultimately physical laws) can account for everything. A fortiori he also rejects a purely mechanistic explanation of the world. "It was always foolish to deny our basic experiences of consciousness and free agency on the grounds that they had no obvious place in a mechanical universe" (p. 27). See also sections on creation and on eschatological hope.

Concerning faith and knowledge

"Whatever our intellectual discipline may be, we are heirs to its traditions, and though our generation may transform the understanding it inherits, it will do so on the basis of correcting the past rather than denying it" (pp. 30-31). "While the search for truth requires a critical evaluation of the past (and present), it is not likely to be assisted by a negative scepticism. The risk of initial commitment to what appears to be the case is a necessary part of finding out what is actually the case" (p. 31). "The search for truth is an intellectual adventure rather than the execution of a programmed procedure" (p. 32). "We have to believe in order to understand and we have to understand in order to believe" (p. 32). "How we know is controlled by the nature of the object and the nature of the object is revealed through our knowledge of it" (p. 32). "One is only too aware of how inadequate our powers of rational provision are to anticipate the surprising way the world is" (p. 33).

"God is known because he has chosen to make himself known, through gracious disclosure. This revelatory action does not take the form of a mysterious conveyance of incontestable prepositional knowledge; rather, it is mediated through events and people which have the character of a particular transparency to the divine presence and to intimations of a lasting hope" (p. 33).

"I do not pretend that belief in the resurrection is demonstrable beyond a peradventure, but in chapter 6 I shall seek to show that it is rationally motivated" (p. 34). "Scientific facts are not uncontroversial matters, like electronic counter readings or marks on photographic plates, but they are the interpretations of those raw registrations, interpretations which are themselves embedded deep in current theoretical understanding" (p. 34). "The more deeply personal the encounter with reality, the more profoundly will its significance depend upon the interpretation attributed to it by its participants" (p. 34).

"The diversity of religious claims can be seen as a cancelling cacophony. Or it can be seen as the inevitable consequence of the search for One whose glory must be veiled, whose infinitude can never be caught in our finite nets, whose light is refracted by the cultural prisms of humanity" (pp. 34-35). "The matter cannot be settled by a priori argument" (p. 35). "I am certain, however, that our search for knowledge of God will have to seek an anchorage in experience: that theology stands in need of data which in George Tyrrell's words are not tacked down to the table by religious authority"' (p. 35). "The data for Christian theology are to be found in scripture and the tradition of the Church (including, of course, the contribution of our own experience), and in such general insights about order and purpose that may be brought to light by the play of reason on the process of the world" (p. 35).

"The distinction between explanation and understanding is very important for theology. Understanding in science is a deep experience going beyond mere predictive power or the currently fashionable notion of algorithmic compressibility" (p. 36). "To understand something is to feel an intellectual contentment with the picture being entertained" (p. 36). "The ability of understanding to outrun explanation ... points to an ability to grasp things in totality, the occurrence of an insight which is satisfying to the point of being selfauthenticating, without dependence on detailed analysis" (p. 37). "The attainment of understanding in this way does not remove the obligation to seek subsequent explanation, to the degree that it is available, but the insight brings with it a tacit assurance that such explanation should be there for the eventual finding" (p. 37). "Theology, of course, faces an additional problem in that its method is not only elusive but its infinite Subject is also necessarily beyond the total grasp of finite minds. A consequence is that it is easier to say negatively what is not the case than to describe positively what is the case" (p. 39). "The way things are is the only reliable basis for the way we should respond to them" (p. 41). "Theology shares with any other metaphysical world-view that generality of account which means that it is neither impervious to contrary evidence nor immediately falsifiable by it" (p. 42). "I think science and theology can make common cause in opposing decline into a merely intellectual utilitarianism and in insisting on the pursuit of the difficult but essential task of seeking to understand what is" (p. 50).

Concerning God himself and his unity

"It is part of the classical Christian tradition ... to lay stress on the simplicity of the divine nature. Naturally this does not mean a facile rational transparency ... but an unanalysable unity of being. ... The main import of that proclamation is surely to assert that there is one prevailing will behind the world's existence and so to free us from the ambiguity of a dualism of light and darkness. It is not to make a metaphysical point about the divine nature" (p. 54).

"Theism explains much more than a reductionist atheism can ever address" (p. 56). "Modern Western unbelief has something of the air of a cultural aberration in its rejection of a spiritual dimension to reality" (p. 57).

"It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot be subject to fluctuation if he is worthy of being called divine. ... I do not think that God is necessarily simply eternal, so that he can only relate to time in a holistic way" (p. 59). "Thus, I am persuaded that in addition to God's eternal nature we shall have to take seriously that he has a relation to time which makes him immanent within it, as well as eternally transcendent of it" (p. 61). "The veiled action of God within unpredictable process means that divine providence cannot be factored out from what is going on, with this set of events attributable to him and that set to natural causes. There is one web of occurrence in which all agencies interlace" (p. 69).

"My claim would be that theism has a more profound and comprehensive understanding to offer than that afforded by atheism" (p. 70).

Concerning creation

The current scientific account of cosmic history is briefly described. "There are some speculations (particularly in the very early cosmology) and some ignorances (particularly in relation to the origin of life), but there seems to me to be every reason to take seriously the broad sweep of what we are told. Theological discourse on the doctrine of creation must be consonant with that account" (p. 73). The general impression left in the reader is that the evolutionary account of cosmic history is scientifically certain, though it is subject to some improvement. Theology in the author's view cannot reject portions of this account as contrary to what is known through a divine communication of knowledge in Holy Scripture. To my mind this is a naive credulity in scientific speculation. "Theology is concerned with ontological origin and not with temporal beginning" (p. 73). Emanationism is rejected. "Christian theology, on the contrary, sees the world as the consequence of a free act of divine decision and as separate from deity" (p. 73). "This concept can be held to have played an important part in the ideological undergirding of modern science, for it implied both that the world was rational and also that the nature of its rationality depended on the choice of its Creator, so that one must look to see what actual form it had taken" (p. 74). "To hold a doctrine of creation ex nihilo is to hold that all depends, now and always, on the freely exercised will of God. ... There is no contradiction in holding at the same time a doctrine of creatio continua, which affirms a continuing creative interaction of God with the world he holds in being. The two are respectively the transcendent and the immanent poles of divine creativity" (p. 75). "Belief in creation ex nihilo will always be a metaphysical belief, rooted in the theologically perceived necessity that God is the sole ground of all else that is. Belief in creatio continua can be more directly motivated by our perception of cosmic process, the evolving complexity of a universe endowed with anthropic potentiality" (p. 76). "The intrinsic unpredictability of chaotic systems is to be interpreted as leaving room for the operation of top-down organizing principles, which complete the description of what happens by their accounting for the way a system actually negotiates its labyrinthine envelope of possibility" (p. 77). "These higher-order principles act in a way corresponding to the input of information rather than energetic causation" (p. 77).

"God's will is not whimsical. It is steadfast and he is the very antithesis of any arbitrary magician. Yet he is also personal and he can be expected to act in particular ways in particular circumstances" (p. 77). "There may well have been throughout its" {cosmic history} "unfolding a succession of particular critical points at which a divine influence was exercised in particular ways" (p. 78). "Another consequence of the picture I am proposing is that God interacts with the world but is not in total control of all its process" (p. 81). "This curtailment of divine power is, of course, through self-limitation on his part and not through any intrinsic resistance in the creature" (p. 81). "The appearance of self-conscious beings has profoundly modified the course of evolutionary history, for now there is an alternative mechanism, of great power and effectiveness, for transmitting information from one generation to the next, other than by coding in DNA" (p. 86). The author seems to fully accept a polygenesis of humanity and not to accept the descending of all human beings from one initial man and one initial woman. This is even clearer when he presents his understanding of original sin.

"The subtle complexities of ecological feedback make the predictions of models very uncertain in their relevance, however confidently they may be proclaimed.... What does seem certain is that the politically very delicate question of population control is central to the attainment of a sustainable strategy" (with respect to the environment) (p. 87).

Concerning Jesus Christ

"There are two extremes to be avoided. One is to attribute to Jesus such extraordinary powers that he effectively ceases to be credibly a recognizable human being. The other is so to recoil from this error that one treats him as if he were an uninteresting mediocrity" (p. 100). The author defends the extraordinary character of Jesus Christ. He will profess his faith in the sinlessness of Christ, but he seems to take a rather heterodox view of Christ's consciousness of who he was. "I cannot think that Jesus saw his future laid out before him in fine detail, for I believe he lived a truly human life to which precise foreknowledge would be foreign. But equally I cannot believe that he did not see in general terms that rejection and execution awaited him in Jerusalem, or that he did not trust that nevertheless he would be vindicated. To believe less than that is to make him out to be lacking in insight and faith" (p. 100). "The basis of Jesus'understanding of his mission lay in his firm confidence in God his Father, not in a detailed foreknowledge of what would happen" (p. 101).

Concerning the divinity of Christ

"The New Testament writers raise the question of Jesus' relation to the divine without resolving it" (p. 126). In the author's view, the realization of the divinity of Christ only comes later. "Why is Jesus so different? I think the answer must be that God was perceived to be present in and with him in some unique, unprecedented way. Clearly, the resurrection was a spur to this judgment, but it was also motivated by the new life those early believers had found for themselves in Christ" (p. 128). The author asserts his belief in the full genuine humanity of Jesus Christ and also his divinity. He rejects docetism and adoptionism. "The Church came to the conclusion that it had to use both divine and human language about Jesus, and it had to do so simultaneously, not sequentially as the primitive Christologies had attempted to do. It was necessary to assert that Christ was true man but also 'of one Being (homousios) with the Father"' (p. 134). He rejects Arianism. Even more explicitly he claims that "no account of the incarnation will fail to emphasize that Jesus makes God known to us in the plainest possible terms, by living the life of a man, but to rely on the revelatory character of his life alone is to adopt a gnostic account of our redemption" (pp. 140-141). He professes his belief in the salvific sacrifice of Christ. "All the divine that could be shared by humanity is united with humanity in Christ. He is totus deus (wholly God), but the earthly Jesus is not totum dei (all of God)" (p. 142). Does he fail to take the step of uniting the human nature and the divine nature in the unity of the second divine person, because he finds traditional philosophical and theological conceptions unacceptable?

Concerning the Holy Spirit and the Church

"The early Church felt that it experienced divine power present within it with a peculiar intensity and personality. ... It took several centuries to reach the agreed conclusion that the Holy Spirit is to be spoken of as a third divine Person, together with the Father and the Son" (p. 146). The Holy Spirit is a work within the world and within believers and has inspired scripture. "The Bible is not a kind of divinely guaranteed textbook in which we can, without any trouble, look up all the answers. I find the notion of the'classic', rooted in its own age but possessing through its underlying universality the power to speak across the centuries to other ages, to be the category which best contains my understanding of the spiritual power of scripture" (p. 152). "The Spirit's activity in relation to scripture cannot be confined to the initiating moments of authorship. He must be conceived as being at work in the Church's endorsement leading to the formation of the canon, and in the developing understanding of the sacred writings within the tradition of the Church" (p. 153). A special role of the Holy Spirit in the magisterium of the Church is missing.

Concerning eschatological hope

"I have already (chapter 1) explained that my understanding of our nature is not framed in the dualist terms of an incarnated soul. The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of survival of death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather, the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new environment of his choosing" (p. 163). "An intermediate state between death and the End could be accommodated, and it would find its natural expression in terms of those remembered patterns of ourselves held in the mind of God" (p. 173). For all of the author's insistence on hope in personal individual resurrection, His conception of man's constitution does not seem to warrant such a hope. It is hard to see how his explanation allows for genuine personal identity between the individual in this life and the resurrected individual. The link he supplies, the remembered pattern in God's mind, hardly makes the individuals be actually one and the same individual.

"One might say that panentheism is true as an eschatological fulfillment, not a present reality" (p. 168). This is the interpretation he gives to the Eastern Christian notion of deification.

Summary remarks

On the positive side the author criticizes a good many heterodox views expressed by contemporary authors. On the negative side his own orthodoxy is incomplete, as would in part be expected in a Christian who does not embrace the fullness of Catholic faith.

He views the understanding of faith by the Christian community as normative but does not acknowledge any special authority to the magisterium (it is hard to see, of course, how anyone who does not accept the fullness of Catholic faith could hold otherwise). Theological explanation is reformable, like scientific explanation, but it must also conform to the given, in this case not only the experience of the initial disciples but also the experience of God's ongoing action through the Holy Spirit in the Christian community. There does not seem to be room, however, for dogmatic authority to judge when revised theological explanation does in fact conform to the given. This is certainly a weakness in his position. Likewise, there does not seem to be any room for dogmatic authority in determining the genuine meaning of Holy Scripture. The author rejects many contemporary heterodox assessments of the New Testament, but seems to leave it to the private judgment of the individual within the believing and worshipping community to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.

He attributes a structure to God's nature and temporality to God and not merely to his effects. His purpose seems legitimate enough, but his formulation inadequate. If he intends no more than the distinction between the divine persons within the unity of the divine nature, all is well. Does he contemplate three agents with a specifically common nature and complete agreement of will? If that were to be the case, it would not be acceptable. He does not claim to be more than an amateur theologian. Thus his lack of clarity might at times be the result of an inadequate conceptual framework. His formulation of theological explanations does not employ many fundamental traditional philosophical and theological distinctions, such as substance and accident, without which, in my opinion, an adequate theological explanation of "the sacramental real presence of Christ" (p. 159) in the Eucharist is not possible. It should be noted that on this point, as on others, the author refers in a very summary fashion to other works in which he develops his position more explicitly. Without reading those works, only a guess as to his views would be possible.

There are a good many sound criticisms of reductionist accounts of the world, and also of the inadequate presentation of scientific methodology by some philosophers of science.

The lack of a clear essential (or substantial) ontological unity of the evolved more highly organized individual components of the world as distinct from aggregation of multiple individuals in an accidental unit seems to be one source of the deficiency of his proposal. He does not appear to have first hand knowledge of the theological positions of St. Thomas Aquinas. His few references to Thomism appear to come from very secondary sources.

The author's reflections are so broad in scope that even with the lengthy excerpts and comments in this review, much as been left without explicit comment.

In summary, there is much that is good in this book, but there are also significant deficiencies. It would be good reading for those scientists who think that Christian faith is not compatible with what we now know to be true.

Because of his criticisms of many heterodox positions, the book could be useful to persons well founded in Christian theology, who would not be mislead by the author's theological and creedal deficiencies.

 

                                                                                                              J.W.A. (1995)

 

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